Sellers Let us sell your home.

One service that we believe is extremely important in New Braunfels real estate markets is helping our listing clients to objectively evaluate their homes for marketability. Some brokerages do a once–over to get the information to put into the various information fields in the listing. However, we go much more into the detail of the features, characteristics and condition of your home.

We will want to postpone some photos until we’ve worked with you to do a thorough inspection of your home with a whole lot of details in mind. Every buyer who sees your home will be comparing it to the competition in your area and price range. How your home compares is critical to how soon you sell it and at what price.

• We’re going to work with you in several areas of concern:
• Interior features & characteristics - While the number of bedrooms and baths are not something you’ll be changing to compete better with other homes, you do need to objectively compare them in order to end up with a listing price that will get your property sold. Some things we can consider for improvements, others we just need to know how your home compares to other homes buyers will be seeing.
  • Other features/characteristics:
  • Floor plan
  • Built date and obsolescence
  • Floors & walls condition, paint, etc.
  • Kitchen features
  • Room sizes
  • Lighting, skylights, windows
• Exterior - That “curb appeal” thing really does mean something. When a prospective buyer first drives up in front of your home, they’re going to get a first impression that is very important. We help you to look at things like landscaping, exterior paint and condition. Here is an area in which small expenditures can yield big results. It’s a fact that some buyers will ask to leave without ever stepping across the threshold if they get a bad first curb appeal impression.
• Condition - Minor repairs can also make a major difference. Many buyers assume that a need for minor repairs indicates a general lack of fundamental maintenance over time. They’ll discount their offer, if they make one, thinking they’ll have a lot of work to do to bring the home to a good condition. So, we’re honest with you about things that we see and buyers will see and consider in their evaluation. From cracked window panes to scarred walls or doors, we’ll let you know what we believe is important and make suggestions.

Kustom Real Estate LLC. is here to make sure that your home enters the market in the very best competitive position possible. A thorough and objective evaluation is an important step.

What would an upward or lower price adjustment look like based on the current market CMA? Well, let’s look at an example. Let’s say that the CMA of previously and recently sold similar homes shows that the listing price should be around $235,000. However, those sales were between one month and three months old. Our current market listing CMA shows that similar homes in the neighborhood are listed at $249,000 or thereabouts. We and you may decide that the market is improving and justifies raising the listing price of your home to $245,000 so that it’s still competitive but a better deal for you. Of course, this can work the other way as well.

A proper list price that reflects current and realistic market conditions is critical to getting your New Braunfels real estate property sold quickly. We don’t want you to under–price, but it’s worse to over–price in any market. Buyers discount value by DOM, Days On Market. The longer a home stays on the market, the greater they’ll discount their offers. So, a realistic list price is how we make sure your property sells without languishing on the market.

How do we come up with a suggested list price that reflects your home’s competitive position? It’s a combination of services and experience, and we’re going to be very careful and detailed in our analysis and market evaluations to make sure that you don’t leave money on the table or sit around wondering why you aren’t getting offers.

Our evaluation of how your property compares to the current competition is the first step. Then we may suggest some worthwhile corrections you can make to improve that position. Once we know what your home will look like when listed, we’ll go into our thorough CMA, Comparative Market Analysis, process.

CMA of Sold Properties
First we select comparable properties out of those sold recently and in the neighborhood or nearby. These “comparables” or “comps” are selected based on similarity in features, location and characteristics with your home. They must have been sold as recently as possible so the sold prices are of maximum value.

We then do a go through a detailed “adjustment” process to adjust their sold prices for any differences with your property. If a home has one more bedroom than yours, we would adjust that property’s sold price downward for the value of one bedroom to make the comparison “apples to apples.” We make adjustments for garages, bathrooms and other major features to bring our comps to closely compare with your home. Then we use those sold prices to arrive at a preliminary listing price for your home.

We say “preliminary” because we have another CMA step.

CMA of Current Listings
Now we get more comps, but instead they’re properties currently listed and your competition. We go through the same adjustment process, and we come up with another, possibly higher or lower, price suggestion for your home. This second CMA gives us more up–to–date information about the market which could cause us to lower or raise our preliminary list price to adjust to the current market. Using the two CMA results and an experienced analysis of your home’s position in the marketplace, we can set a listing price that will get the job done.

Let’s cut through the hype you may be seeing as regards Internet marketing of New Braunfels real estate. Sure, every brokerage worth its salt has a website. And, our website is better than most in presenting our seller listings to showcase them to their greatest potential. And, we’re really good at all of that SEO, Search Engine Optimization, stuff. That’s the stuff we do on our site to get as high in search engine results as possible to get the most in search engine visitor traffic.

However, hyping up this SEO and site traffic is really ignoring the reality of the Internet and any single website’s visibility; unless you’re Yahoo or Google. There is no single real estate website that’s likely to enjoy more than a single digit percentage of searches performed by buyers looking for local properties. That’s because there are hundreds or thousands of real estate sites and they’re all fighting for searchers, but these searchers are also using a half dozen search engines or other resources to locate real estate in our area.

Why tell you this? We want you to learn about the power of “syndication,” and why Kustom Real Estate LLC. spends significant resources, time and effort in syndicating your listing information to a great many real estate websites much larger and more heavily visited than any local real estate websites. We have systems in place to have your listing on dozens of websites, including Yahoo, Trulia, Zillow, and others, and within days of your listing going live.

So, although we’re getting great search engine exposure, we’re not relying on it to be our only resource to sell your home through online marketing. Each of those sites to which we syndicate your listing will have links back to the original and complete listing at our website. It’s there that we shine in marketing your New Braunfels real estate property once we’ve attracted visitors from these other sites.

• We take a full and expert suite of professional quality images of your home. These images will showcase your property and are critical to Internet marketing. Surveys prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that buyers value high quality images more than any other feature of real estate listings.
• Virtual tours when appropriate are created for your property. Some properties are better marketed with still photographs, others with a slide show of stills, and some with a video and voice–over. We’ll work with you to produce the very best marketing approach for your property.
• Thorough professionally written text descriptions and very thorough information fields to bring every facet of your property to the prospective buyer.
• Once a buyer gets to our site from these many conduits, we don’t just let them look and leave. We offer showings and other special information about the market and your property in exchange for their contact information. If we can get into direct contact with them, it’s going to increase our chances of selling your property to them.

Kustom Real Estate LLC. gets a great deal of our listing business from referrals by our satisfied sellers, so don’t hesitate, let us get started in helping you today!

One service that we believe is extremely important in New Braunfels real estate markets is helping our listing clients to objectively evaluate their homes for marketability. Some brokerages do a once–over to get the information to put into the various information fields in the listing. However, we go much more into the detail of the features, characteristics and condition of your home.

We will want to postpone some photos until we’ve worked with you to do a thorough inspection of your home with a whole lot of details in mind. Every buyer who sees your home will be comparing it to the competition in your area and price range. How your home compares is critical to how soon you sell it and at what price.

• We’re going to work with you in several areas of concern:
• Interior features & characteristics - While the number of bedrooms and baths are not something you’ll be changing to compete better with other homes, you do need to objectively compare them in order to end up with a listing price that will get your property sold. Some things we can consider for improvements, others we just need to know how your home compares to other homes buyers will be seeing.
  • Other features/characteristics:
  • Floor plan
  • Built date and obsolescence
  • Floors & walls condition, paint, etc.
  • Kitchen features
  • Room sizes
  • Lighting, skylights, windows
• Exterior - That “curb appeal” thing really does mean something. When a prospective buyer first drives up in front of your home, they’re going to get a first impression that is very important. We help you to look at things like landscaping, exterior paint and condition. Here is an area in which small expenditures can yield big results. It’s a fact that some buyers will ask to leave without ever stepping across the threshold if they get a bad first curb appeal impression.
• Condition - Minor repairs can also make a major difference. Many buyers assume that a need for minor repairs indicates a general lack of fundamental maintenance over time. They’ll discount their offer, if they make one, thinking they’ll have a lot of work to do to bring the home to a good condition. So, we’re honest with you about things that we see and buyers will see and consider in their evaluation. From cracked window panes to scarred walls or doors, we’ll let you know what we believe is important and make suggestions.

Kustom Real Estate LLC. is here to make sure that your home enters the market in the very best competitive position possible. A thorough and objective evaluation is an important step.

What would an upward or lower price adjustment look like based on the current market CMA? Well, let’s look at an example. Let’s say that the CMA of previously and recently sold similar homes shows that the listing price should be around $235,000. However, those sales were between one month and three months old. Our current market listing CMA shows that similar homes in the neighborhood are listed at $249,000 or thereabouts. We and you may decide that the market is improving and justifies raising the listing price of your home to $245,000 so that it’s still competitive but a better deal for you. Of course, this can work the other way as well.

A proper list price that reflects current and realistic market conditions is critical to getting your New Braunfels real estate property sold quickly. We don’t want you to under–price, but it’s worse to over–price in any market. Buyers discount value by DOM, Days On Market. The longer a home stays on the market, the greater they’ll discount their offers. So, a realistic list price is how we make sure your property sells without languishing on the market.

How do we come up with a suggested list price that reflects your home’s competitive position? It’s a combination of services and experience, and we’re going to be very careful and detailed in our analysis and market evaluations to make sure that you don’t leave money on the table or sit around wondering why you aren’t getting offers.

Our evaluation of how your property compares to the current competition is the first step. Then we may suggest some worthwhile corrections you can make to improve that position. Once we know what your home will look like when listed, we’ll go into our thorough CMA, Comparative Market Analysis, process.

CMA of Sold Properties
First we select comparable properties out of those sold recently and in the neighborhood or nearby. These “comparables” or “comps” are selected based on similarity in features, location and characteristics with your home. They must have been sold as recently as possible so the sold prices are of maximum value.

We then do a go through a detailed “adjustment” process to adjust their sold prices for any differences with your property. If a home has one more bedroom than yours, we would adjust that property’s sold price downward for the value of one bedroom to make the comparison “apples to apples.” We make adjustments for garages, bathrooms and other major features to bring our comps to closely compare with your home. Then we use those sold prices to arrive at a preliminary listing price for your home.

We say “preliminary” because we have another CMA step.

CMA of Current Listings
Now we get more comps, but instead they’re properties currently listed and your competition. We go through the same adjustment process, and we come up with another, possibly higher or lower, price suggestion for your home. This second CMA gives us more up–to–date information about the market which could cause us to lower or raise our preliminary list price to adjust to the current market. Using the two CMA results and an experienced analysis of your home’s position in the marketplace, we can set a listing price that will get the job done.

Do you know how many comparable properties to your home came on the market this week? How about how many were sold or taken off the market? Markets are constantly changing, and it’s our job to monitor these changes and keep our listing clients informed. Changes in the competition don’t always require a price adjustment, but they may. Sometimes they just cause us to make changes in our marketing approach, putting emphasis on features that are no longer available in currently listed comps.

Whether we’re suggesting a price adjustment up or down or not, we’re always concerned with our seller clients’ peace of mind that their real estate property is properly priced and positioned in the market. Use the form on this page to tell us about your property and we’ll do a preliminary CMA for you with recently sold comps in your area. We’ll need more data to do the best job, but you can begin to see how the process works.

We love helping New Braunfels real estate buyers to find the perfect property. But we love even more the ways in which we can help them to buy it at the very best price with the very best terms. Sometimes negotiations aren’t all price. A great contract can involve other seller concessions that create the right deal for our buyer clients.

Real estate market data – How can you be expected to make price offer decisions in a vacuum? Kustom Real Estate LLC. spends a great amount of time and effort in collecting market data to help our buyers in their price negotiations. This data involves not only sold property prices by neighborhood, but also current listing pricing to determine the competitive nature of the market.

This data is very thorough, and it’s call a Comparative (or Competitive) Market Analysis. There are two parts, the comparison of the property you’re considering to similar properties recently sold in the nearby area. This gives us a firm grip on what has happened in the near past, but by nature it is “past” data, thus possibly not accurate for the market as it is when you’re in negotiations. We then do another CMA process on the currently listed properties most like the one under consideration and in the same neighborhood or nearby. This gives us a current market snapshot so that we can adjust our valuation model and our offer to reflect the current market situation.

Thorough knowledge of your situation – Only through constant communication we can advise you properly in pricing negotiations. By understanding your motivations and financial capabilities, we can help you craft a price negotiation strategy with the highest probability of success.

Seller motivation research – While it’s not always legally possible to determine why someone is selling, there are things we can glean from their listing and price activity that will allow us to help you to negotiate from a position of strength.

It’s not all money – There are a lot of ways to negotiate a real estate deal, and they don’t always involve money. Perhaps the seller doesn’t have a lot of ability to work with you on price, but they can make other concessions that could result in a deal. We help you to take the best approach.

It’s not over till it’s over – Many real estate price negotiations involve multiple counter offers and a lot of back–and–forth. We’re with you with each counter offer to adjust your negotiation strategy accordingly. Because we can’t know the seller’s financial limitations in many deals, some buyers are elated when they cut a major low-priced deal on a home, but then after inspections they hit a brick wall in negotiations with the seller related to repairs. The negotiation to purchase a home isn’t over with the price on the contract, and it’s best to know that a real deal at the front end could result in less flexibility after inspections in the repairs discussion.

The thing to remember is that Kustom Real Estate LLC. is right there with our New Braunfels real estate buyers throughout the negotiation process with the latest information and experienced advice.

While our sellers tend to become less stressed as soon as all of the purchase contract signatures are in place, Kustom Real Estate LLC. is with them and ready for the next negotiation phase. Property inspections can frequently result in buyer requirements for corrections by the seller. Whether you’re prepared for these or they come as a surprise, we’re here to help you to deal with them, as repair disputes are the most frequent reason for contract failures before closing.

Part of our job is to help you to avoid too many “surprises” related to condition and repair negotiations after inspections. We’ll do our best to give you information about what we see that buyers may want corrected, but there are definitely things that neither nobody can anticipate until the inspectors have submitted their reports. So, there’s one other thing we try to do in order to prepare you and leave some negotiation room for you.

We want you to always be thinking ahead to inspections and repair demands from the first offer. Always be thinking of what may be coming in the way of inspections and repair negotiations, especially when the initial purchase contract price negotiations are in play. No matter how urgent your need to sell, if you go too far in price concessions at the beginning, you may have no room left when inspections are done and condition corrections are requested by the buyer.

As the buyer is normally paying for and ordering inspections, our job for our sellers is to make sure that they happen on time and that we receive the inspection reports by deadline due dates. We then meet with our sellers and go over the reports and any buyer objections/requirements to develop a counter strategy. If there are no objections or they’re minor in nature and cost, you may opt to agree to corrections. However, if they’re more extensive and were not anticipated, our job is to help you to reply in a way that saves you money and keeps the buyer in the transaction.

Depending on the desires of the buyer and their selection of inspectors, there could be as few as a single inspector hired to do a thorough inspection of the home and all equipment supporting the home. However, there may also be other inspectors hired with a more focused goal, possibly a heating and air conditioning contractor, a well inspector, septic inspector, etc. Each of these inspections will have deadlines for completion and submission of reports and buyer requests for corrections.

We have our own list of inspectors and contractors, and can call in experts to provide cost estimates and help our sellers to make decisions within the deadline times. Unless you have multiple offers, a buyer in the hand is worth something. Our job is to get them to the closing table and your satisfaction with your net proceeds from the sale.

Our seller clients really appreciate our services in listing, marketing and getting a buyer signed on the dotted line on a purchase contract. However, neither they nor we can rest just because a contract is inked. There are more than 50 tasks and deadline deliveries on our normal residential seller side real estate transaction checklist. And, we take our responsibilities seriously in the processing of all documents and meeting of all deadlines.

The process of taking a signed purchase contract through to closing involves a great many details, deliveries and document submissions. We coordinate all of this for our sellers, making sure that all phases of the closing process move along smoothly.

• Title - We work closely with the title company and attorneys to make sure that all documents and deliveries are processed in a timely manner. We work with our sellers to examine all of their title and recorded documents to uncover all material defects and items of importance. Though this is normally of more concern to the buyer, sellers must respond to their objections, so it’s important to know what’s in all recorded documents. Example: while there are normally few items in a title binder that can be corrected as they’re recorded and pass with the property, sometimes there are requirements or exceptions that weren’t expected but must be addressed. With the more careful lending environment, more “quit-claim” deeds are being required as one example. Perhaps you have a previous divorce and the lender wants better protection against claims and will require a quitclaim deed from your former spouse.
• Inspections, Survey & Appraisal - Our job is to coordinate access for inspectors and the appraiser, and to accept deliveries of reports as well as any objections or correction requirements from the buyers. We take this job seriously and will be with our sellers every step of the way. Every instance of delivery of an inspection and/or buyer objections requires a response in most cases, and there are deadlines. We stay on top of these deadlines, make sure reports are delivered to you on time or extensions are put into place, and that you respond within required time lines. Failure to do so could obligate you to repairs or other corrections or kill the deal.
• Repair Negotiations - If the buyer submits requirements for corrective actions to items on reports, we work with our sellers to determine the cost of those requirements and the appropriate response necessary to keep the deal going in a way beneficial to our seller clients. Should you agree to make certain repairs, there will be deadlines associated with completion, and possibly requirements for the buyer’s inspector to return and re-inspect for completion and repair quality. We keep all of this on track for you, and can recommend contractors we know do quality work at fair prices.
• Lender Document Coordination - One of the leading causes of delayed closings is some problem with funding due to lender last minute requirements or other document demands. We are monitoring all document flows to make sure this doesn’t happen for our sellers. As the seller, you aren’t getting a mortgage, but you need to be very concerned with the buyer’s ability to do so and their lender’s process and ability to meet deadlines and fund at closing. Mortgage problems kill a lot of deals, so we’re going to be involved in the buyer’s process to protect you, our seller client.